Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union

Table of Contents - 2006 - Volume 2, Highlights of Astronomy 14 (Highlights of Astronomy)  

Contributed Papers

The IceCube neutrino observatory: latest results on the search for point sources and status of IceCube construction

Thierry P.A. Castermansa1 and Albrecht Karlea2† for the IceCube collaboration

a1 Université de Mons-Hainaut, B-7000 Mons, Belgium email: Thierry.Castermans@umh.ac.be

a2 Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI53706, USA email: jauffenb@uni-wuppertal.de

Abstract

The AMANDA neutrino telescope, prototype instrument of the IceCube neutrino observatory at South Pole, has collected data since 2000 in its final configuration. A period of 1001 days of livetime between 2000 and 2004 has been analysed in order to find evidence of a neutrino signal coming from point-like sources such as microquasars, active galactic nuclei, supernovae remnants or gamma ray bursts. A sensitivity to fluxes of νμ + νμ + ντ + ντ of dΦ/dE =1.0 · 10−10 (E/TeV)−2 · TeV−1 cm−2 s−1 was reached in the energy range between 1.6 TeV and 1.6 PeV. No significant excess over the background has been found so far. Flux upper limits infered from this study can constrain certain neutrino emission models of X-ray binaries. IceCube will have a substantially higher sensitivity. Currently at 10% of its final extension, it will comprise 4800 optical sensors deployed along 80 strings by early 2011, instrumenting one cubic kilometre volume of ice and 1 km2 at the surface.

Keywords

  • Neutrinos;
  • cosmic rays;
  • point sources;
  • gamma rays

Footnotes

† <http://icecube.wisc.edu/science/publications/vulcano2006.html>